Evolve the Conversation Blog

CONNECTION is why we are here.  our STORIES connect us. our FEAR separates us.

can we find the COURAGE to give up our ADDICTION to PERFECTION?

can we SHARE our stories, struggles, joys in an AUTHENTIC way?

can we see VULNERABILITY as BEAUTIFUL rather than weak?

can we believe that WE ARE ENOUGH?

Twenty minutes is a small eternity in modern translation but this
brilliant, insightful TEDx talks video by Brené Brown is worth
watching. Twice.

A nationally renowned speaker, author and educator, Brown’s
groundbreaking work has been featured on PBS, NPR, CNN. She is a
research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of
Social Work who has spent the past ten years asking some rather
profound questions: How can we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities
and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of
authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage,
compassion, and connection that we need to recognize that we are
enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?

They are big questions, ones I struggle with hourly. Our culture does
not encourage imperfection. And yet our hearts harden without it.

Welcome. These posts will attempt in some way to evolve the conversation we have with ourselves, with each other, with art, history, time, poetry, love, chocolate–pretty much anything that seems worthwhile!

What if our stories were not carved in stone? What if historical events were not? What if we could evolve these stories? Turn them upside-down? Inside-out? Provide a new context? Engage in a new conversation? What if we could rebuild what is broken? What if instead of bombshells raining down over Berlin, it was poetry?

Since 2001, the Chilean art collective Casagrande has been staging “Poetry Rain” projects in cities that have suffered aerial bombings in their history—cities like Warsaw, Berlin, Santiago de Chile, Dubrovnik, and Guernica. In Berlin in 2010, thousands gathered in the city’s Lustgarten as 100,000 poems rained down from the sky. The poems, dropped by helicopter, included work by 80 German and Chilean poets.

What if on 9/11 what filled the sky was a migration of monarch butterflies?

Two years after the Twin Towers fell, my husband, Joe, and I were driving down the West Side Drive, past the meat-packing district when I saw what looked like debris falling from the sky. The image broke my words into silence. Then we got closer and the debris was not debris at all. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Monarch butterflies were beginning their 2,500 mile migration to Mexico.

Perhaps we are being given signs all the time on how we can evolve our conversations. Perhaps our stories are made of clay.